Life by the Month

A thriving weekly magazine may be more lucrative than an equally thriving monthly. Conversely, a weekly that does not prosper is more troublesome than a monthly. On that theory Life appears this week for the last time as a weekly, publishes its first monthly issue Dec. 4. Its bulk will be fattened from 32 to 64 pages, its price upped from 10 to 15.

Life's publishers believe that its circulation, which has dwindled from a peak of 250,000 to about 100,000, will be resuscitated by the change; that many more persons will buy and read an improved magazine once a month than now buy and read it every week.

The slowing of tempo gives Editor Bolton Mallory an opportunity to do what he said he wanted to do when he took office last year: make the magazine less funny. There is little of the dentist-office jokebook about the new Life. Its features are presented in full page units. More and longer articles and better drawings are the order. Contributors include Montague Glass, Sam Hellman, Ely Culbertson, Baird Leonard ("Mrs. Pepys' Diary"), Jefferson Machamer. Jack Kofoed (Sports), Artist Frederic G. Cooper (covers).

No attempt will be made to report every cinema, every play and nightclub that opens in Manhattan, every book that is published. Instead, a single "man-about-town" feature is contemplated wherein ostensibly one writer reports (as in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town") the most entertaining things lately seen, heard, read, done.

The advent of Ballyhoo had nothing to do with Life's change, according to the publishers. Newsstand sales did suffer in the week of Ballyhoo's first issue (TIME, July 6) but they have been slightly above normal since then, possibly because Ballyhoo stimulated the demand for funny magazines.

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